Robbie Graham was the reseacher who first pushed the importance of the Chase Brandon story. He also ws the man who drafted the letter to the CIA about Chase Brandon's public statements that the 1947 Roswell was a real ET crash based on material he had seen at CIA headquarters. Graham has now published an update on the case

UFO Think Tank Radio show host Alejandro Rojas will be doing a show on CIA Agent Chase Brandon and his controversial claims that the 1947 Roswell crash was an extraterrestial event. The guests discussing this with Alejandro will be Lee Speigel, Stanton Friedman, and Grant Cameron. The show will air from 7:00pm - 8:30pm (Arizona time) Monday, July 16, 2012.

A big question that has been around in the UFO community for many years is the question of whether or not the government has been busy trying to influence the public knowledge and understanding of UFOs.

If true, the CIA is one of the government agencies that may have been involved in this influencing. One of the reports of this possible interaction goes all the way back to 1973 when producer Bob Emenegger reported the presence of a representative of the CIA who was present during the entire production period for the documentary "UFOs, Past, Present, and Future,"

On July 12, radio host George Noory at Coast to Coast AM had former CIA media representative Chase Brandon on his show. Brandon is now attached to the Agency as a contract employee. Noory posed a specific question to Brandon as to whether or not the CIA has tried to influence Hollywood related to UFOs to acclimatize the population to what is really going on. Thanks to the work of Giuliano Marinkovic that link is now available for all to hear.

These are very rough notes from interviews that were done with CIA Contract Agent Chase Brandon on two Coast to Coast AM radio appearances. As he is still employed by the CIA he represents the agency on the subject of UFOs when he talks.

It should be noted that in the first June 23 interview Brandon was coll and collected. In interview #2 on July 12 he seemed very rattled at times and there was a long pause when he was asked if he had ever been asked by the CIA to influence Hollywood productions about UFOs.

If Brandon is the new CIA Falcon every word he says should be studied very carefully.

People who wish to hear the actual interview can still access it in the audio vault at cjob.com (use June 24 1:00pm and July 13 1:00pm as the time settings)

“There is clearly an endless supply of such stories, and they are always volunteered to people who are prone to believing them but have no ability to check them." Jacques Vallee

In a July 8th story run in the Huffington Post 35-year CIA veteran Chase Brandon spelled out for reporter Lee Speigel how he came to learn that the 1947 Roswell crash was an extraterrestrial event. He stated that he learned this while walking through an area at the Langley headquarters.

"It was a vaulted area and not everybody could get in it," Brandon told Speigel. "One day, I was looking around in there and reading some of the titles that were mostly hand-scribbled summations of what was in the boxes. And there was one box that really caught my eye. It had one word on it: Roswell.”

"I took the box down, lifted the lid up, rummaged around inside it, put the box back on the shelf and said, 'My god, it really happened!'"[1]

UFO Hocus Pocus: The Story of the Falcon

Part of our intelligence process is to be involved in counterintelligence, to lead the enemy in another direction by providing those misdirecting dots. From the book Homeland Security and Intelligence

"Something does not make much sense here. Why would someone in Washington mount a disinformation effort if the only result is to confuse members of the UFO research community, which is a very small group without much influence over the public at large?" Researcher and Author Jacques Vallee

Cast of Characters

Bill Moore – Prominent author and UFO researcher in the 1980s. Moore wrote “The Roswell Incident” which put the 1947 Roswell UFO crash story on the map. Prior to the book no one in the UFO community had ever heard of the story. He released the now infamous MJ-12 documents (a document that purported to be a UFO briefing for then President-elect Dwight Eisenhower) to the UFO community with Jamie Shandera and Stanton Friedman.

Jamie Shandera – Shandera was Hollywood film producer who teamed up with Bill Moore to research and release the MJ-12 document. He was not a UFO researcher prior to teaming up with Moore. It was Shandera who received the MJ-12 document in the mail.

Stanton Friedman – The third member of the MJ-12 research team who played no part in the hocus pocus detailed below. When approached with the name of the Falcon he told me “never heard of the guy.”

The Aviary – When Moore and Shandera were operating with their many high level intelligence sources in the 1980s, they used bird names for each source so that they could talk on the phone about the sources without using their names. Thirty years later Moore and Shandera have still not disclosed which person represented each bird. Most of the birds were never aware of this bird naming game till years later, and few if any know which bird they were.

The Falcon – The Falcon was one of the two most important birds. Moore has now confirmed that he believed Falcon to be Harry Rositzke - a former high ranking CIA official who was brought out of retirement claiming to represent a group of government insiders who wanted the UFO story put into the public. Moore apparently never met Rositzke but calculated who he must have been.

Richard Doty – Acted as the Falcon to protect the identity of the real Falcon. Reported to be a Special Agent for Air Force Office of Special Investigations at Kirkland Air Force base, but may actually have been working not for AFOSI but for Air Force Intelligence according to a new claim.

Lee Graham – A technician working for Aerojet in a classified position who was chosen to leak the documents that Moore and Shandera were receiving from their intelligence sources.

Setting the Stage

In a lecture given in Las Vegas in 1989 researcher Bill Moore recounted how the story of the Falcon and how the document leaks began,

"In early September, 1980, I was approached by a well- placed individual within the intelligence community who claimed to be directly connected to a high-level project dealing with UFOs. This individual told me that he spoke for a small group of similar individuals who were uncomfortable with the government's continuing cover-up of the truth and indicated that he and his group would like to help me with my research into the subject in the hope and expectation that I might be able to help them find a way to change the prevailing policy and get the facts to the public without breaking any laws in the process. The man who acted as liaison between this group and myself was an Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent named Richard Doty.”

On 23 June, 2012, in an interview for the popular American radio show, Coast to Coast AM, the CIA’s former liaison to the entertainment industry, Charles ‘Chase’ Brandon made extraordinary claims about the so-called “Roswell incident,” in which the US military is widely believed to have retrieved extraterrestrial materials and bodies after a mysterious object crashed in the deserts of New Mexico.

Brandon declared:

"I also absolutely know as I sit here talking to you that there was a craft from beyond this world that crashed at Roswell, that the military picked up remains of not just the wreckage, but cadavers."

Most explosively, Brandon recounted an occasion when he saw direct proof of the alien nature of Roswell while conducting research at the CIA’s Historical Intelligence Collection (HIC) as part of his role as CIA Entertainment Liaison Officer (ELO). Brandon claimed he had the rare opportunity to look inside a box labelled “Roswell” containing “materials... papers... [and] other items” but stressed that he “cannot, will not, under any imaginable set of circumstances tell you what I saw in there specifically,” with the implication being that to reveal more specific details would be a breach of national security.

Based on what he claims to have seen in the box, Brandon stated unequivocally: “100 percent, guaranteed... Roswell happened. There was a craft, absolutely cadavers,” but added, “Beyond that, I have no idea where anything else went.”

The “Roswell Incident” first came to public attention 65 years ago on 8 July, 1947, when the Roswell Army Air Force (RAAF) hastily announced to the press its “capture” of a downed “flying saucer” on an isolated ranch. A few hours later, the RAAF changed its story to the effect that what had been recovered, in fact, was a common weather balloon. The United States Air Force (USAF) was to change this story again in 1995 with the announcement that the “weather balloon” had been a Top Secret high-altitude spy balloon. This story was then officially re-written in 1997 to account for several apparently non-human bodies multiple eyewitnesses claimed were recovered from the crash. The bodies, the USAF equivocated, were human corpses, test dummies, or both.

To date, Brandon is the most senior CIA officer – former or serving – to have claimed direct knowledge of an extraterrestrial link to the Roswell incident. Brandon worked for the CIA for thirty-five years, twenty-five of which he spent in the Agency’s elite Clandestine Service as an undercover, covert operations officer. His foreign assignments involved international terrorism, counterinsurgency, global narcotics trafficking and weapons smuggling. He was also an Agency foreign political affairs analyst, Presidential briefer to Bill Clinton and an instructor in paramilitary and espionage tactics at secret CIA training camps. In 1996, Brandon began his ELO role in which he advised on numerous films and TV series– often uncredited – quietly shaping scripts, characters and concepts. In other words, he is an expert at working both the news and popular media. It fits, then, that Brandon was speaking in the context of a promotional interview for his new fictional UFO-themed book, The Cryptos Conundrum.

Judging from online chatter, the UFO community is wondering if Brandon’s Roswell comments may herald the much anticipated ‘Disclosure’ of alien reality. Brandon’s book passed through the Agency’s Publications Review Board (PRB), and his radio interview should, as standard procedure, have also been subject to prior approval by the PRB. If Brandon’s comments were subject to official approval, and if he was speaking the truth, then this might indicate that the CIA is using him to work what the Agency calls a ‘limited hangout,’ whereby previously hidden information is released to the public in order to prevent a greater exposure of more damaging details.

In this context, it is noteworthy that Brandon carefully absolved the CIA of any on-going complicity in an active cover-up of the Roswell incident. Brandon implied that all that now keeps this information from the public is 65 years’ worth of storage dust and the patchy institutional memory of the powers that be. As Brandon tells it, the Roswell incident is as dead as the alien cadavers he claims must be stored “somewhere.” Yes, Roswell was real and extraterrestrial, says Brandon, and yes, the evidence was “put in cold storage,” but today’s Agency should not be held accountable for the actions of a handful of panicked and perplexed Cold War-era agents who shuffled off their mortal coils decades ago and who took what little knowledge they had to their graves. And those Agency employees who do occasionally stumble across Roswell evidence today have no real understanding of what they’re looking at or what to do with it. In terms of a revelation about the existence of aliens, Brandon’s rendering is about as depoliticized as it gets.

Victor Marchetti, former special assistant to Deputy CIA Director Richard Helms, once said that the government uses limited hangouts “when their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public.” In such instances, said Marchetti, “they resort to admitting – sometimes even volunteering – some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”

Fittingly, in 1979, Marchetti himself raised eyebrows with his own public statements on the UFO issue. In an article for Second Look magazine, Marchetti wrote: “I do know that the CIA and the US government have been concerned over the UFO phenomenon for many years and that their attempts, both past and recent, to discount the significance of the phenomenon and to explain away the apparent lack of official interest in it have all the earmarks of a classic intelligence cover-up.” He added, “My theory is that we have, indeed, been contacted – perhaps even visited– by extraterrestrial beings, and that the U.S. Government, in collusion with other national powers of the Earth, is determined to keep this information from the general public.” However, Marchetti was merely voicing an opinion and does not claim to have seen proof of extraterrestrial contact with his own eyes, as Brandon does.

Not insignificantly, Brandon also claimed during his interview to have spoken to JFK’s coroner, who he says confirmed to him that the President had been shot from the front and was therefore most definitely the victim of a conspiracy. Of course, Brandon’s own personal ‘disclosures’ may prove an effective way to sell copies of his book, and also to whet appetites for his forthcoming sequel, The Hour Glass. This is certainly the more mainstream interpretation of what has transpired here. Still, such a deceitful and outlandish marketing strategy runs the risk of Brandon appearing to be, well, deceitful and outlandish. For a man currently employed as Senior Consultant to SpecTal, the intelligence division of defence giant BAE Systems, Brandon’s Roswell declarations are liable at least to raise difficult questions among colleagues. Furthermore, in the unlikely event that any costs result from Brandon’s statements, such as if they prompt someone to steal material from the HIC, he could at least be sued by the government.

A former high-level Reagan Administration official told us that “if” extraterrestrial material was in the possession of the US government, it would of course be classified, while another highly-respected ex-CIA Special Operations officer stressed to us that “All [CIA] employees sign a Secrecy Agreement. Violation of that agreement can bring severe repercussions.” When we made doubly clear to this CIA veteran that our enquiry related specifically to the UFO issue, he restated his position word-for-word, with the addendum “Have a nice day.” In theory, the penalties include life in jail or even a death sentence.

As yet, however, Brandon has fallen artfully through the cracks in the national security system. Even though in practice the government is clearly sensitive about the UFO phenomenon (with reams of declassified documentation from every branch of the government revealing high-level concern about UFO incidents worldwide into the post-Cold War era), it has maintained since the closure of the USAF’s Project Blue Book in 1969 that UFOs are definitely not a national security concern. Furthermore, the very concept of ‘national security’ is more slippery than is often suggested by the image of square-jawed, be-suited men with guns. Former Chairman of the PRB, John Hollister Hedley, commented recently that even the CIA’s own definition of national security was not “hard and fast” or “absolute or constant.” Consequently, whether there is any truth to Brandon’s statements or not, Washington would be hard-pressed to prosecute, even if it had the will to do so.

We asked Chase Brandon to elaborate on and justify his Roswell comments. He has yet to reply.

We also sent the CIA a list of questions and requested a formal response to Brandon’s allegations. The Agency has assured us they are looking into our enquiry and will get back to us “quickly.” We are still waiting.

About the Authors:

Robbie Graham is a doctoral candidate at the University of Bristol for a PhD examining Hollywood’s historical representations of UFOs and potential extraterrestrial life. He holds a Masters degree with Distinction in Cinema Studies from the University of Bristol and a First Class Honours degree in Film, Television and Radio Studies from Staffordshire University. He has broadcast on BBC Radio, Radio Ireland and Canal+ TV. His articles have appeared in a variety of publications including The Guardian, New Statesman, Filmfax, Fortean Times, Adbusters and the peer-reviewed journal of North American Studies, 49th Parallel.

Matthew Alford, PhD is the author of Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy (Pluto Press, 2010). His academic and journalistic work focuses on the relationship between entertainment, political power, and propaganda in the United States. His academic work has appeared in a number of peer-reviewed journals, including Scope: An Online Journal of Film and TV Studies, Westminster Papers for Communication and Culture, and 49th Parallel. He has been interviewed as an expert on Hollywood propaganda for publications and broadcasters including Vanity Fair, Media Lens, Z-Net, Russia Today, Press TV and Al Jazeera, among others.

A note from the authors about this story:

We were unable to find a mainstream outlet for our report, despite its conspicuous newsworthiness in light of this week’s 65th anniversary of the Roswell incident. Our article was submitted to the following mainstream and alternative news outlets:

Huffington Post

Telegraph

Telegraph on Sunday

Roswell Daily Record

Albuquerque Journal

Santa Fe New Mexican

Guardian

Daily Mail

Los Angeles Times

National Post

Globe and Mail

Toronto Sun

Toronto Star

Raw Story

Mother Jones

Z-Net

Alternet

GregPalast.com

Regardless of the exact nature of the UFO phenomenon, it is a great shame for those of us interested in either UFOs or government propaganda that Chase Brandon's statements have been unchallenged and, indeed, unreported outside of the UFO community and that the CIA itself has yet to respond to them, despite our enquiries. Brandon’s statements beg explanation for several reasons, not least because they indicate that the concerns of the powerful are very distant from those of ordinary citizens in a participatory democracy.